


A Home Built on Stillness (A Home Built on Movement)

by ChocoChipBiscuit



Category: Seasons of Glass and Iron - Amal El-Mohtar
Genre: F/F, Fairy Tale Retellings, Found Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-14
Updated: 2018-06-14
Packaged: 2019-05-23 07:43:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,570
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14930084
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChocoChipBiscuit/pseuds/ChocoChipBiscuit
Summary: They walk miles and roads in patterns of ones and threes and sevens, east of the sun and west of the moon, through lands unseen and stories untold, until they find a cottage in the woods.





	A Home Built on Stillness (A Home Built on Movement)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Dolorosa](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dolorosa/gifts).



> I love the original short story by Amal El-Mohtar and was pleasantly surprised to find a tiny fandom for it on AO3! Thank you for the prompts, Dolorosa!
> 
> Also, thank you to AlexSeanchai for kindly taking this on as a last-minute beta!

Amira and Tabitha stumble hand-in-hand into spring and warm summer days, wayward wanderers both. Tabitha teaches Amira to tell the poison berry from the pure, so that she might never mistake glossy promise for nourishment, and leans into Amira’s shoulder as they watch the river raise its skirt of geese. They walk miles and roads in patterns of ones and threes and sevens, east of the sun and west of the moon, through lands unseen and stories untold, until they find a cottage in the woods.

Many stories take place in the woods, whispering between the boundaries of known and unknown, but these woods are particularly strange. This forest is timeless; iconic rather than specific, the sunlight falling in filigrees of gold and shadow through the leaves. The sky is green with fir and birch, pine and maple. The cottage garden is thick with wandering mint and rosemary, bordered by trees laden with dawn-gold peaches and dusk-blue plums, red pears and green apples, all ripe with the colors of spring, summer, and fall.

If the seasons refuse to be pinned to this storybook landscape, then perhaps Tabitha need not fear being pinned either. This is a home built on movement.

The cottage smells of gingerbread and magic, under the choke of dust and time, and Amira’s heart unfurls like a flower. This is a home built on stillness.

This is their first decision: Amira stays still, the push-pin center of their atlas, and Tabitha may travel larger arcs as they see fit, always threaded to Amira’s core.

Amira and Tabitha overturn the cottage with the bustle of cleaning, sweeping and scrubbing and scouring everything in sight. Perhaps it is the nature of the lingering magic, or perhaps it is because their own stories still hold some charge, but the house yawns, stretching itself to accommodate their needs.There are fresh foods in the larder, clean linens in the closets, and packets of seed in the shed.

Amira turns seeds in her palm, counting them. Some are familiar friends, dried sunflowers and cured bulbs of tulip. Some are unknown, tiny brown grains and oblong seeds that roll across her skin with whispered promise, hidden worlds beneath their hulls.

This is their second decision: if Tabitha finds other lost girls—children, foundlings, women—she will bring them home.

Tabitha kisses Amira goodbye in the rich warmth of the kitchen, the air strewn with dried herbs, the plates still scattered with crumbs. She needs no crumbs or stones to mark her way, not when the needle of her heart is still set on Amira’s.

Amira bakes bread, plants seeds, practices knitting in the quiet dark of an empty house surrounded by golden solitude. She rediscovers the joys of small movement, the pulse of blood through muscle, her breath trailing long fingers in gelid air. Amira finds beauty in observation. She need not go farther, only deeper. She is struck by the way sunlight filters through the window slats, dust motes suspended as if in gold or honey. There are birds and trees she has no name for, and she finds a new-old library in their obliging cottage, the dust still fresh from creation as yet another room births itself. There is a pleasure in recognizing finch from sparrow and vetch from primrose, to move from wonder to familiarity.

She is alone without loneliness, secure in Tabitha’s return.

Tabitha returns a week later with new shoes: neither glass nor iron, but sturdy leather, meant to last. Its longevity is faithfulness, not rather than penance. She laughs, scuffing her shoes against the rich earth, and Amira kisses her barefoot under the pines, rooted in place and soil. Tabitha finds beauty in open roads and easy miles, the joy of wandering for wandering’s sake, but her heart’s compass is always set for home.

Tabitha also brought a thin-boned girl, her pockets full of stones and crumbs. Her eyes are hollow, not with want, but with what is left _after_ wanting, after learning that nothing comes of wanting. The cottage has its own ideas on how to welcome this foundling, and Tabitha raps the walls to make it stop wafting gingerbread. The cottage sulks as Amira offers plain brown bread, a wedge of cheese, and vegetable soup. The garden has already offered its first harvest, carrots and peas and potatoes and onions all growing within days of being planted.

Amira tucks the child into bed and looks out the window, at the moonlight painting silver shadows across the garden. She plants beans, and when the stalk breaks the clouds in early morning, Tabitha climbs.

Tabitha returns with an immense woman, red-haired and laughing, that offers welcome to her new neighbors and requests two cups of sugar. Amira offers goods from their pantry—sugar, flour, two sacks of potatoes, and a wheel of cheese—and the woman smiles with all her teeth, sharp and gleaming, before offering a golden egg in exchange. The deal is struck, and the giantess promises to visit again.

Tabitha takes the egg to town as Amira harvests vegetable and rolls dough with the young girl. They bake a peach pie with a lattice crust, sweet with summer promise. This is their own domestic kingdom, a quarter-turn out of sync with the year’s steady passing, but magic obeys its own hidden steps. They have not yet found its pattern.

When Tabitha returns, it is with half a dozen hens and a woman in a cloak of kingfisher feathers. The cloaked woman wears plain leather boots beneath a silk dress, and holds a small jar of fish bones and a silk shoe.

“I couldn’t let her go barefoot, Amira,” Tabitha says, soft words shading old ghosts, and Amira welcomes the newcomer. The cottage yawns, stretching itself to fit its new inhabitant, and another room mysteriously appears. It neither grows from without nor shrinks from within, and whatever magic sleeps inside the walls shows no signs of dying; perhaps it too is renewed by each new person, all their uprooted tales and broken traditions providing power to this place.

This is Amira and Tabitha’s third decision: no one need speak their story until they are ready.

Gretel’s story is a sad one, though simple. It is written across her face and in every flinch, in the raw lines of her knuckles and the way she reaches for a hand that is no longer there. She is one half of two twins, and learning what it means to be one girl.

Ye Xian washes and sews, and when she speaks her history, it is only to say that a prince was too high a price for escape. Though originally dressed in finery, she is accustomed to labor. Princeless and barefoot, she teaches Amira to mend a button and sew a seam, all the ways of mending what was broken.

Ginger the giantess (“Fee, fie, fo, fum, I alliterate with the best of ‘um!”) comes by again, trading another golden egg for cheese, sugar, and potatoes. As Tabitha takes the gold to town, Amira invites Ginger to stay for tea. She ends up stewing an entire cauldron of peppermint leaves for the giantess, Gretel stirring and straining the contents with cheesecloth. Ginger sips it slow, smacking her lips, and lingers for the rest of the day, uprooting stumps and hauling enough wood to last an entire winter.

Tabitha returns at the sunset, with glass chimes and a mute woman with eyes like sea-foam who walks quick and narrow, as if every step were on blades. She wears a pearl pendant around her neck, rose-tinted, a soft blush against her olive skin. When asked her name, she taps the pendant. ‘Pearl’ she is, and if it is a name chosen rather than given, Amira cannot blame her.

Amira hangs the chimes so they are prismatic grace in stillness, silver music in motion, and learns to speak with hands and signs.

Their wordless friend wears her curse like water, invisible and infinite—she can read, as proven by her clapped delight when finding the library, but cannot make marks of her own, as if hands will not obey eyes. Gretel tries to teach her how to whistle, so Pearl purses her lips together and blows, but magic proves stronger than mechanics, and no sound emerges. She moves beautifully, beautifully, oh—but Tabitha knows pain in numbers, if not degree, and recognizes a twelve when she sees it. This is a clear blue, sharp and icy. It cuts skin like crystal, jagged and ill-fitting. The cottage offers a wheelchair birthed of living wood, and Pearl laughs without sound, head back and throat open, and takes her throne.

Seven of them now, if one counts the living cottage. There is a power in sevens.

Gretel scrubs potatoes with pink fingers, tongue sticking out the corners of her mouth. Ginger splits a fallen tree, flipping it to form a crude table outside the cottage, and places smaller stumps for benches and chairs. Ye Xian sews a long cloth to cover the new table, and Tabitha brings combs of honey, tins of tea, all the small bounties that their obliging cottage cannot provide. Pearl brings her appetite as Amira spins, directs, still center to all this bustling movement, and Tabitha moves in preservation of momentum.

They are all worth rescue. They are all worth saving, even if they must save themselves. They all belong.


End file.
